Costly, time-consuming and painful, a biopsy in the country often leaves cancerpatients exhausted much before treatment begins. In an attempt to simplify the process and alleviate the pain, IIT Ropar has come up with rough sketches of what promises to be, a low-cost mechanism to detect skin cancer. The thermal imaging process to detect skin cancer is a mechanism that will make detection of skin cancer considerably cheaper and also ease the existing process, which involves a painful extraction of skin tissues for testing.

The research team, headed by professor Ramjee Repaka, proposes to cuts the process to a painless 20-minute hospital sitting. The technology uses highlysensitive infrared (IR) thermal cameras to videograph the surface of the skin.The camera designed to capture an `image' of the thermal activity in the body, maps cellular-level temperature changes during the procedure to confirm presence of cancer cells. "It is a noninvasive and non-contact solution that we are working on," says Ramjee, explaining the procedure. In the first step, a patient is made to place a cold gel pack on the surface of their skin to cool the body temperature. Following this, the skin is allowed to transition to room temperature, while the IR camera records the change in thermal state....Read more